Explanations for Plagiarism

Sure, we can condemn plagiarism and appraise remix-appropriation-whatever. But really – how do you come up with the idea of releasing full songs that you had nothing to do with, like Laromlab did? Why would you want to perform live with recordings of other people’s tracks? Would you think that you could get away with it? If not, what kind of motivational drives are stronger than (un)consciously knowing that you will be labeled as a faker?

I sent an e-mail to TV Death Squad with similar thoughts: “I am honestly interested in your motivations behind this. I think it’s too late to say that you’re a VJ and that everybody knew that you didn’t do the music. The bookers did not know. The credits were not on the Myspace. I am more interested in *why* you did it like this. Why did you use chiptunes instead of other music? Why did you upload other people’s music to your myspace, and rename it? Why did you perform with it? Why do you think this is ok?” Here’s what he said:

“i am really sorry about everything. i never meant to piss off everyone i looked up to. i want to tell you exactly how this mess happened so maybe you can forgive me or at least understand. i am a dj/ vj or whatever you want to call it.  i started off wanting to be able to mix chiptunes over vinyl, and ended up running a ds lite w/ mp3s into a korg esx and using it for filtering… than i saw how you guys were doing these cool visuals over 8bit, and i started taking more of an interest in that.. so i invested in a korg entrancer so i could merge it w/ a microkorg and use it to sample visuals over my fav. chip.

I gave up on doing chiptunes and just vjayed and dj’d 8bit with what i had access to on the visual end..   the cool thing about that was that you could process both audio and video at the same time w/ the keytar.  i started introducing everyone in oklahoma city to a bunch of my favorite artists i would find on 8bitpeoples.. i sincerely didnt mean to cause any trouble or diss anyone. i hope you understand that i wasnt trying to jip anyone.

furthermore, to the best of my ability (and it can be difficult with electronic music) i tried to label the right names on the player… i thought i had random, mesu, and combat dave all with the right names on the playlist but as far as goto80 i honestly couldnt remember where i found that song..  it really hurt my feelings that i offended you guys on this level, but after thinking about it from your point of view i understand. i hope you accept my forgiveness, i really just wanted to be a chiptune vj. i did take down all the videos, and erased the myspace today. i also had two vj shows that i cancelled. again, im really sorry about this whole thing.”

This explanation leaves out aspects like why the bookers thought he was a composer/performer and not a dj, and why he renamed the songs when uploading it to Myspace. The answers for those questions might be too personal for him to  answer  himself.

If he just would have called himself a DJ and acted like one (not uploading songs, not dance around with a gear-strap-on, and beat mixing), there would be no drama at all, right? So, if you are doubting if what you are doing is morally/legally okay, just call yourself a DJ and you’ll be fine. (lame disclaimer: of course some DJs are a lot more performative than some live-performers)

Performance of the Year

Performing chip music can be quite difficult. Check this guy rocking out! … to a song by Random!? … with keytar-faking… and on/off glitch visuals?

There are also videos of him performing Mesu Kasumai, Psilodump, Ten and Tracer, and on his Myspace there were songs made by Random, me, Combatdave, and Wiklund. Yesterday he removed the content from his Myspace, and the videos he posted at Youtube. This seems like one of the more obvious cases of plagiarism since Laromlab, and definitely the one with the hottest keytar faking! Stay tuned with this 8bc-thread.

Edit: ah wait, here he has the volume turned up on his mega-rig, to play along with Random’s song. Check out the lovely blöp böp böööl.

Update: TV Death Squad’s reply to Random: “ive had the whole world pissed off.. FIRST off i am a VJ, not a musician… i specialize in visuals, i am no different than an 8 bit dj with vocals… i have done nothing but help promote how bad ass your music is and even do visuals over it.. EVERYONE at the event knew who wrote every song, thats why i had the setlist with the artists names !! i can understand why your pissed, but it sincerely is not what you think.. anyways, if you or random or wik are upset ill remove any promo for you guys.. let me know”

VJ and music promoter, that’s one way of putting it. Also, Gameboy Genius has made a rundown of the thread at 8BC here.

eMod: a Universal Tracker?

About a year ago I read about a tracker that would be able to import music made by other trackers, from various platforms. To my surprise, there is now a beta version out! “There are hundreds of possible types of files that this program will need to work with; most of them i have no idea about yet, because i’ve not studied them, or not even heard about them. I believe my vision is possible.”

For now it only handles a few Amiga tracker formats (Future Composer 1.0-1.4, Delta Music 2.x, and 4-channel Protracker) and only works for Windows. But soon there will be support for e.g Fasttracker and SID (!) and he also mentions VST, MIDI, and visualizers.

It’s not supposed to go public yet, but it doesn’t hurt to give it a go. So far my Amiga music plays well – although eMod sounds different from both Deliplayer and my Amiga1200 (so, it’s not only because of PC-jitter?). But let’s try not to swamp the man with requests and bug reports. Read his post about what (not) to expect and download the beta version here. And be very afraid of the future.

update: btw, check KEEP for an even more gigantic emulation project

Hot Glitches II – The Return of Lukas

Lukas Nystrand, known for Amiga hiphopdubjazz, noise, AHX-dub, a musical loom, ascii and pixel art, and gigantic inflateable whales, has another surprise up his sleeve. Apparently now he started coding C64, and it is brutal glitchy punishment for you! This audio is beyond me…

Check more at his Vimeo.

Also, two super-new glitch videos that I was involved in are here and here and if you need more you could go here.

Interview With Wermut on Sampling Music

I’ve conducted an e-mail interview with Wermut, who appropriated a C64-song by Mindflow, to see what their view is on sampling and music ownership. The purpose is not to discuss formal issues or moralize, but to explore the reasons for sampling (chip)music and not attributing. The interview corresponds with ideas I have sketched before; Wermut comes from a culture based on sonic exchanges whereas the dominant (outspoken) discourse in chipmusic seems to be more about individual ownership.

WERMUT > First of all let me say that we are quite amazed by the reactions which are caused by a 5 year old song. And quite frankly we have the impression that there are other motivations behind all this witch-hunting than a mere copyright problem. But anyway, we will try to answer your questions… Before we burn on a stake!

CHIPFLIP > Could you tell us how you found Timewaster? Are you connected with the demoscene, or 8-bit music?

WERMUT > In 2003 I discovered the SID-Collection on the internet and listened to all of the 27087 songs in order to pick out my personal favourites. One of them turned out to be MINDFLOW’s “Wooloop”. I love this song for its simplicity and minimalism, yet it is so effective!

In the 80s I already was a musician for a small group of wannabe hackers on the Commodore Amiga. Since then I wrote songs (and still do, even if my Amiga 500 is showing signs of passing away soon) on the legendary soundtracker… And of course I was into the Amiga demo scene! I never had a C64 though… But I wish I had :(

CHIPFLIP > Is your Amiga music available somewhere online?

It once was online, for years, but our provider erased everything.

CHIPFLIP > Have you used 9-second-samples for other music you have made?

WERMUT > Sincerely, I do not keep track of all the things I sample. I consider myself an artist, not a “thief”… If I like a sound or a melody, and if I think that this will do good in a song, than it can help create something different and new, then I use it. This is, incidentally, the way 99,9 % of techno music is made! Funnily enough, the people who have a problem with this are rarely musicians themselves…

There are not many samples in the music of WERMUT though… And we consider the song “Away” more than just a 9 second sample! The sample may be the basis of the song, but there is a whole additional instrumentation and vocals, which makes it something very different… I hope that the guys behind MINDFLOW agree to that.

CHIPFLIP > Are you getting more attention for the Timewaster-sample than other samples you’ve used?

WERMUT > We’ve never had any kind of “attention” about any samples we’ve used before… Not that we used that many… And quite frankly we’re still amazed by the reactions created by this one. Maybe that is due to the fact that we come from the techno and industrial scene, where a sampler is an instrument like any other. And I think this particular reaction has largely to do with that forum phenomenon, which seems to get somehow “out of hand”!

CHIPFLIP > Do you usually contact authors when using sampled material? Why did you choose not to contact the authors of Timewaster?

WERMUT > No. Having been a musician for quite a long time, I’ve had several times the pleasure of recognizing samples which were taken from my music in songs of other people, who did not contact me… And frankly, I was flattered every time. And anyway I do not consider the work I do my “property”… It goes way beyond that!!!

On the other hand I think it was YELLO who once said, that if somebody “steals” from you, this only means that there is “something” to steal, meaning that being sampled should be considered a compliment… Or am I (or YELLO) wrong?

CHIPFLIP > I understand your copyleft-perspective, but isn’t there a difference between using 9 seconds and 1 second? What I mean is – in the extreme case – people copy 100% of another work, and say that they made it themself. How do you make a distinction between sampling and plagiarism?

WERMUT > Well, this is the problem when one starts making laws, scales and charts for everything, isn’t it? Where to begin and where to stop? At 1 second or 1 minute? 2 per cent or 20? Sorry, but this is a dilemma we’d rather leave to other people. We do not think a piece of music is something you can evaluate with percentages. It is a question of feeling and spirit. Even if a lot of people would like to make it otherwise.

Since we listen to techno, industrial, noise, experimental, field recordings, musique concrete and ambient, we do not ask ourselves such questions as “what is music and what is noise”, or what is sampled and what is played live (which, by the way, would be quite head-splitting). We listen to music to feel what is beyond the sound. Not to investigate how every second of it was made!

CHIPFLIP > Do you think that composers in general think it’s more okay to sample large parts of 8-bit music? Why?

WERMUT > 8-bit or 16-bit, what difference does it make, as long as you sample things, because you like what you sample, and create something new out of it. Being interrogated like that, I feel like being accused of making profit of whatever I did wrong…

CHIPFLIP > While Mindflow offers his music for free, and feeding remix culture, you are putting it on vinyl (and supposedly, making atleast some money). You do not share your work for free, even when the 7″ is sold out. Why is that?

WERMUT > Just for the record and for people who might not know what we are talking about here: the 7″ in question was released (not by us) in a 300 copies edition, we haven’t received any money for it but artist copies, as it is usual in the scene we’re involved in, a scene in which, by the way, no big money is made and where one rarely makes any profit at all. We do not receive money for our work as artists, and the little money we earn with our own label is barely enough to pay the production of the next records. So, I don’t think we can talk about profit here!

We make vinyl because we love vinyl, because for us it is the “medium of choice” on which we wish our music to be experienced. As for sharing our work for free on the internet: most of our music is already available for free online on different P2P servers, which we are perfectly happy about, so I don’t see why we should bother doing it ourselves… We have other things to do…. Like making music or, for the reason stated above, earning a living with a tedious job which has nothing to do with music, sampling or anything of that kind…

CHIPFLIP > Earlier you said that there seems to be other motivations than copyright issues. What did you mean by that?

WERMUT > Well, we strongly suspect reasons of a more personal nature behind all this. One more of those silly little vendettas, as they often seem to exist within alternative music scenes. The smaller the scene, the bigger the “clans”. Some people do have a boring life away from the screen.

As far as we are concerned, we use art as a container to transport emotional and spiritual values and we are not very much interested in such materialistic issues as copyright.

We think the whole copyright thing is a chimera, invented by the industry to make even more money than they already do. There is no such thing as true artistic property anyway, meaning the songs we did as WERMUT are not “ours”. The work has been ours, the profit is to the listener… And for God the glory!

That said, steeling other people’s work for personal gain is, obviously, an entirely different matter and we surely don’t condone it. We just don’t believe that copyright can provide a big help.

Another Sampling Controversy – on the Differences Between Plagiarism and Remixing

Wermut has sampled Mindflow’s song for the C64-demo Timewaster. Listen to the original at youtube, and an excerpt of Wermut’s song Away here. It was released on 7″ by Enfant Terrible last year. I e-mailed Wermut 5 days ago without any reply, but the label has added a statement here. This case was first noticed by Zyron and Sander at 8bittoday (who designed Timewaster) informed me and contacted the label. So is this plagiarism, or…?

Timewaster is less than 20 seconds long, but loops for 3 minutes in the demo without getting boring. It’s a spacious little composition, minimalistic and ambient-ish. All of this raises questions about what constitutes a song, and what the difference is between remixing (in its broad sense) and plagiarizing – a topic that both copyright-mongers and remix-idealists avoid all too often.

Looking at the length, timbral diversity, and the amounts of notes, it could be argued that Timewaster is less of a song, compared to (dominant) norms. That means that it is not elaborate or explicit enough – if something more was added, it would be a more substantial song. There is nothing objective about this statement, but I think both composers and listeners can relate to the idea. In fact, Mindflow himself thinks something along this line – he told me that he doesn’t care because “it’s not really a song anyway”.

On the other hand, composers can also over-work a song. You can’t reduce music to a one-dimensional quantity – it is a question of “quality”. Nihilistic relativists would argue that everything has the same (or no) quality, while copyright presupposes some sort of  objectivistic aesthetical authority. But usually we say that quality is something subjective. So, could this subjective perception of quality affect how a remix-composer attributes its sources?

This is actually what I wanted to ask Wermut about, and I think it’s something worth asking yourself aswell. When do you think composers or other artists should credit their sources? What is relevant to credit? When do you do it yourself? Personally, I know that when I sample from “trashy” sources I tend to attribute less. (shame on me)

I guess attribution is important in separating plagiarism from remixing. According to Navas’ definition the remix is based on that the audience knows or understands the origin of a sample. Attribution is thus implicit or explicit in remixing. That leaves out decontextualized appropriations that are so common in remix culture, like what Wermut did. But it’s not a clear plagiarism either, like Laromlab.

Maybe Wermut didn’t find Timewaster to be enough of a composition to credit it. But they obviously thought it had some sort of quality. Maybe they just thought they could get away with it because it was from a C64-demo? Fact remains, without Timewaster, Away would be a very different song. Would Wermut be okay if I used 20 seconds of their music as a defining part of a song that I released on 350 seven-inches, without crediting or compensating them? Would remix-composers in general, that do non-attributed derivative works, accept that others did the same with their works?

PS. On a related matter – the Laromlab Wikipedia-entry has had a proposed deletion added to it. No proof means no truth!

SIDmon and Other Synthetic Amiga Music Software

The other day I stumbled across Metin Seven, one of the people involved in making SIDmon (the first synthetical tracker for the Amiga). I e-mailed him and received extensive answers. He published (much of) these e-mails as an interview: the origin of the chiptune phenomenon.

I was mainly mailing him to hear his take on the etymology of the word chipmusic/chiptune. Usually, it’s said that the term first arose with sample-based Soundtracker chipmusic around 1990. But according to Seven, chiptune was used (just) earlier to refer to synthetical Amiga music. It will take some more research to find out if this was a wide-spread practice.

Listening to songs made in SIDmon 1+2, it sounds quite different from both sample-based and synthetical chipmusic. Soundwise, it actually uses “long” samples (often ST-01/02) a lot more than I expected. The synthesized sounds are used more like instruments among others and there doesn’t seem to be much nostalgia in there. Music-wise, most of the songs are based on minor scales; they are melancholic — not like the happy chip-MOD style. Also, the amount of videogame music covers is very low.

Seven argues that this was the early days of chipmusic, but it might be possible to explain it with software aswell. Synthetic Amiga software produces a sound rather similar to soundchips. Despite that, or maybe because of it, the music created with it takes the shape of melancholic space data music instead, quite different from “mainstream” chipmusic. But this is a very subjective statement. When I hear songs like Paranoimia or M.A.D (youtube-clips) I have a feeling that my brain goes back 20 years and ruins my chance to judge these songs “properly”.

By the way, Paranoimia was composed by TSM in a custom-format. From what I understand, songs that are available in custom format are not necessarily made in a custom program, but stored in a custom format for optimization purposes.

By the way #2, SIDmon 2 was not made by the makers of SIDmon 1. Seven told me that the publishers of SIDmon 1 (Turtle Byte) did not even pay them for it, and then hired Unknown/DOC to program SIDmon 2 (who previously made his own version of Soundtracker). Their own sequel was called Digital Mugician, later followed by the Windows-tracker Syntrax.

Chip Jazz: Miles Davis Tribute Released

Through TCTD we get to know that Kind of Bloop is out. It is a collection of 8-bit versions of Miles Davis’ 50-year-old album Kind of Blue. It has already made some people rather upset, as seen in some of the comments here, which is always a good start. And they made $2,000 in 4 hours, so it is apparently very popular.

As opposed to the conceptual use of chip-sounds here, these versions are jam-packed with notes and effects. It is top notch tracker aesthetics, made by the established figures Virt, Disasterpeace and Shnabubula and also Ast0r and Sergeeo that I weren’t familiar with before. It is a refreshing release in many ways: it’s far from standard harmony disco, it’s not only hardware purism, and as opposed to the abundance of content in so many other places, it is only 5 songs. On the downside, you can only get it through Amazon payment.

Andy Baio, the project leader, was only able to find four 8-bit jazz covers made before. Although that sounds absurd to me, he might be close to being right. Jazz is very different from chipmusic: improvisation, elaborate time signatures, and detailed timing are impossible in many chip music progams. There is not a lot of chip jazz to begin with, and those that do/did jazz didn’t do much covers. On the C64 there are no (STIL-searchable) covers of Davis, Coltrane, or Mingus. But really, four covers, ever? Neaeaääauh. Anyone has any ideas?

Paper: Amiga Music Programs 1986-1995

Johan Kotlinski (aka Role Model, programmer and composer) wrote a paper in 2003 about Amiga music applications, which has now been slightly edited and translated into English. It is an accessible text that describes the two schools of Amiga trackers: synthetical and sample-based.

Johan Kotlinski (2009) Amiga Music Programs 1986-1995

As it was written for a technoculture-course at university, there is a relatively extensive historiography of the early demoscene and how it evolved from cracking. This means that the specific Amiga software part starts only half-way through the text. It starts with describing the brief birth of Amiga-trackers in the commercial sphere: Soundtracker didn’t  sell well but was reverse engineered and appropriated in the demoscene. It became the dominant software on Amiga, and set standards still used in contemporary trackers such as Renoise.

SIDmon pattern editor, screenshot taken from Exotica

Kotlinski states that, looking at possiblities, synthetical software (SidMON) is “clearly” more powerful than sample-based applications (Soundtracker). I think this means that although Soundtracker was more user-friendly, where SidMON offered a higher level of flexibility. I am not sure though. For example, in a previous post I concluded that sample-based software enabled and encouraged more complex handling of note duration/volume. It would be great with some elaboration.

It is obvious that Kotlinski prefers synthetical trackers. At the point of writing the original text (2003) he was developing LSDj and making music in Musicline Editor: both rather unusual trackers in its own ways. Maybe LSDj shouldn’t even be called a tracker, as Kotlinski once argued, due to its 3 sequencer-screens rather than 1 or 2 as commonly found in trackers.

Anyway: this text is obviously based on good research and is an excellent historiography. Enjoy it. I host it on goto80.com, so if you are reading this a million years from now it might not be available anymore. But WordPress will survive forever!

Quiet Works for Cello & Commodore 64

Jonas R Kirkegaard is a danish master student of electronic music who released Quiet Works for Cello & Commodore 64. It is a memory-stick housed in a small wooden box in an edition of 100. Thanks to the kind Jacob Sikker Remin (check his works!) I got a copy before Kirkegaard temporarily migrated to Uganda. From the memory stick:

“The cello and the commodore 64 are old and significant instruments, each in their own  tradition, and they carry a lot of historical and musical references and a great heritage with them. In this project they are presented in slow, simple compositions, with a minimum of post editing and no spectacular performances by instrumentalists. Instead they are merely to be perceived together as very important, musical objects without specific regards to traditions, conventions and technical achievements.”

This is the opposite to the intricate sequencing and programming that follows the dominant perspective of soundchips as limited materials that should do new, spectacular things. Programmed in BASIC, these songs are based on the reiteration of long sounds and notes – something that might look very empty in a tracker. For many tracker-composers (including myself), empty spaces create an itch to “do something” – tapping in to a maximalist form of chipmusic where quantity sometimes gains primacy over quality.

These compositions are minimalist, even more so than the related works of Tristan Perich. Both puts attention to materiality by accepting that the music is determined by technology. Kirkegaard performs these works very quietly, which further moves the “musical form” towards the background.

At first listen it felt a bit pretentious, but as the concept sunk in, I started to like it a lot. It is a form of combination of ambient and noise, and the cello connects it to ‘classical music‘. The technology is just “doing its thing”. Albeit controlled by humans, there is much rooms for SID-artifacts in Kirkegaard’s BASIC-programming. Und das ist gut!